The Halcyon Dislocation

After a risky physics experiment transports the island University of Halcyon to a new world, engineer Dave Schuster and his fellow students struggle to survive in this alien, hostile environment. As tyrannical forces within the University use the catastrophe to strengthen their power and control, Dave encounters an even greater menace which threatens the very existence of their fledgling colony.

In the first book of The Halcyon Cycle, a risky physics experiment transports the island University of Halcyon to a new world. Meglir, a being of great power, is released from his prison and threatens Halcyon and the tiny refugee colony of Eleytheria. In The Battle for Halcyon, we follow the struggles of Dave, Al, Pam and Floyd with their Hansa allies as they work to stop Meglir’s army and find a way to return Halcyon home to its own space-time. Surprising new facts about the continent of Feiramar, her peoples, and her history unfold. A new menace, in league with Meglir, threatens from the east. Will Halcyon continue to follow its program of tyranny to establish a secular utopia? Can Meglir be defeated? Can the island University of Halcyon undo the dislocation and return home? Kazmaier creates a stunning new world at once hauntingly alien and sublimely beautiful. One senses the danger of the unknown, but also the feeling of “coming home.” His depiction of the Hansa, Ancients, boat weed, travel oaks, living cloaks, and blade trees make this fiction series breath-taking in its imagination, yet realistic enough to be believed. Lovers of imaginative, fast-paced colonization epics, which pit good against evil on a continent-wide scale, will find The Battle for Halcyon well worth reading.

Albert Gleeson, his pregnant wife Pam, and his young stepson are struggling to adjust to their life on an acreage in Georgia after their return to our world. However, on his way home from a long day of teaching, Al finds that his home has been ransacked—and his family kidnapped. The police initially suspect him of foul play. When he’s finally cleared, with the help of his friends, Al pursues the kidnappers to Abaddon, a continent whose main land surface rests ten kilometres below sea level. Their search eventually forces them to cross an even deeper abyss, called Sheol, where the air pressure is so high that dragons fly. Fighting frustration and despair at his inability to locate Pam and his stepson, Al soon begins to understand that he has a role to play in rescuing the enslaved prisoners of Abaddon.

What can philosophy bring to the reading of Beckett? Combining intertextual analysis with a ‘schizoanalytic genealogy’ derived from the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe, Garin Dowd’s Abstract Machines: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy after Deleuze and Guattari offers an innovative response to this much debated question. The author focuses on zones of encounter and thresholds of engagement between Beckett’s writing and a range of philosophers (among them Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant) and philosophical concepts. Beckett’s writing impacts in a variety of ways on Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and, in particular, resonates with Deleuze’s contributions to the history of philosophy (in books such as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque), and his ‘critical and clinical’ approach to literature. Furthermore, the books co-written with Guattari, concerned as they are with the ‘molecularization’ of the discipline of philosophy in the name of ‘thinking otherwise’, reveal themselves in a new light when explored in conjunction with Beckett’s œuvre. With its arresting perspectives on a wide range of Beckett’s works, Abstract Machines will appeal to academics and postgraduate students interested in the philosophical aspects of his writing. Its engagement with alternative contributions to the question of Beckett and philosophy, including that of Alain Badiou, renders it a timely and provocative intervention in contemporary debates on the relationship between literature and philosophy, both within the field of Beckett studies and beyond.

The Great Gatsby and its criticism of American society during the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed the distinction of writing what many consider to be the "great American novel." Critical Companion to F.

Feminist cultural historian Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum caps her previous work with The Future has an Ancient Heart, a scholarly study of the transformative legacy of African origins and values of caring, sharing, healing, and vision carried by African migrants throughout the world. Birnbaum focuses on the long endurance of these values from the first human communities in south and central Africa, ones that Africans manifested in the region of the African mediterranean landmass that later separated Africa from Europe and Asia when the ice melted and waters rose. These migrants reached every continent and later became spiritual as well as geograpical migrations back to Africa, from ancient times to the transformative present. Using the same methods as her teaching, Birnbaum employs a mutual learning process in her work to help us think about our own ancestral story, adding to the wisdom we need to surmount contemporary crises and give us the energy to help bring a more equal and just world into being. Her methodologies are grounded on empirical techniques of science and the social sciences and yet leave openings for the liminal knowledge that resides underneath and beyond boundaries of established religions, secular ideologies, and conventional science. A true work of transformation, The Future has an Ancient Heart opens the door to new possibilities within our world.